I always feel embarrassed getting the Senior’s Discount at the grocery. Being in the check-out line with younger people attempting to feed their kids good food, seems THEY deserve the discount. Plus, in the winter here, the kids are so happy to get out of the house they dash up and down the isles like some kind of sporting event. Burning calories like crazy while increasing their appetite, their parents should at least get a small reward for care and maintenance of these little eating machines.
For me, I should probably at least give a speech at discount time thanking all the Doctors, Surgeons and friends who’ve kept me alive to this point.
Wonder if the problem here is we’ve assigned the delivery of services to organizations and those organizations streamline people into receivers of policy? A type of prejudgment made necessary by the design limitations of trying to provide equal services to a diverse range of people all with differing needs?
Not necessarily related but years ago as a family we went to the 1986 British Columbia Exposition. Spread over acres of plazas, the designers had made sure there were lots of public toilets everywhere. Being there with two Daughters and one wife, it soon became clear that an equal number of dedicated toilets for men and women was a bad design feature. Setting aside the reasons for this, it became normal that by 10:00 AM every day, women had begun commandeering and reassigning blocks of men’s bathrooms to female use only. What I found interesting was though the people as individuals on-site changed daily, the reassigning process seemed predictable and spontaneous.
It’s possible this type of unpredictable behaviour is a quality of being human? Or maybe only under certain circumstances? Ironically, it makes sense to institutionalize kindness or consideration to overcome the institutions’ habit of de-humanizing. Thanks for the posting.